Adobe Product Evangelist Maxwell Hoffmann (mhoffman@adobe.com) covers product features and issues related to Technical Communication Suite; FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, Acrobat Pro and Photoshop. Watch for blogs on how to use advanced or little known product features, helpful workflows, and tips n' tricks for a multitude of authoring Doc/Help solutions. You will also find periodic Captivate videos that illustrate useful step-by-step processes to save time with publishing. Comm Tech Pub challenges will be covered. You may find this relevant, whether you are publishing to PDF, HTML or ePubs. Please visit our official Tech Comm Suite blog which covers all things related to all products and issues: http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/

Posts tagged "ePubs"

Much has been written or presented on the process of converting content for mobile devices and tablets. But little has been written about how we must change the way we write for delivery to a device that displays about one ninth of web or PDF content viewed on a single laptop screen.

This blog touches on a few of the points I shared in my Intelligent Content Conference 2012 (#ICC12) presentation, “Resizing Content for the Small Screen: Considerations for Single-Source Authoring for Tablet and Mobile Delivery.” Subsequent blogs and probably an enhanced conference presentation on this topic will follow. Since only two of my 34 PPT slides had been seen before, I was curious how the early riser audience would react. The participants did connect with the message; in fact a few of them missed breakfast staying for an overtime discussion.

From this …

To this

…. In just 5,000 years

Ironically, some of the earliest known business “documents” were composed and read on “tablets.” Some 5,000 years later, we have come full circle to tablets again, only this time they are digitally dynamic, capable of receiving up-to-the-minute correct data. Due to their small size and portability, Sumerian clay tablets held concise, to the point messages in Cuneiform. Now that we are delivering content that was written for another medium to our new, iPhone-sized “tablets”, we need to reexamine the length and relevance of what we intend to deliver.

If I were wearing my Adobe Evangelist hat and wanted to make a shameless sales pitch, I would write about the ease of swapping templates in FrameMaker and Tech Comm Suite to shape content to resemble a small screen while you write. Or comment about single-source publishing from FrameMaker via RoboHelp to a variety of ePub formats. But that’s not my mission today.

Remembering what you hear can “measure” what would effectively display on an iPhone

Colleges provide different tracks for Broadcast Journalism vs. Print Journalism. Why? Because TV or Radio news content must be substantially shorter than what is written for newspapers or magazines. (Substitute your favorite digital equivalents for the media mentioned in the previous sentence.) Our brains can process and remember more points when visible text is present. When we process information that we hear with no supporting visible text, we can handle about one thought per sentence. And sentences must be shorter; no longer than normal speed speech with one breath. (Please don’t consider my verbal speech/speed and words per breath as a good model to follow!) Continue reading…

Much has been written about how the job title “technical writer” or “technical editor” is probably out-of-date. Today’s authors and editors of mission critical technical information have taken on new, hybrid roles. This is the perfect week to reflect on this topic as the Intelligent Content Conferencemeets in Palm Springs February 21st through February 24th.

Content Curation

Tech comm publishers must gather and filter information from ever widening channels and feeds of evolving source material. It may seem a bit like trying to fill water cooler bottles from Niagara Falls. The key to Content Curation is “intelligence”, the ability to discern what is relevant for the product, for the mission and for the intended information consumer.

Images in motion

A series of progressive, static screen captures is often no longer adequate to engage and inform the tech comm consumer. Since so much of the workforce is being conditioned by hours of viewing YouTube and other video content, not suprisingly, many consumers become impatient having to page through 17 pages of captioned static images rather than watch a 7 second motion capture.

Fortunately, Tech Comm Suite delivers an excellent solution, enabling authors to embed dynamic media (from Captivate and other sources) directly into FrameMaker source files. A poster image will indicate the intent of the motion capture or video, and users can view dynamic motion illustrations in PDF or Help files.

Smaller and smaller screens: ePubs

We’ve all seen the overwhelming statistics of how dramatically iPad, Kindle and other eReaders and full functioned tablets grew in sales late last year. Over the past 18 months, a sizeable segment of information consumers have become adept at and used to finding engaging technical content on their smart phones.